Emma Stone Hosts, But Headlines Dominate ‘SNL’

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bcollinsNovember 13, 2011

Emma Stone, Bill Hader, and Coldplay (NBC)

The cast and writers of "Saturday Night Live" lucked out this week: The news wrote the entire show for them.

Yes, host Emma Stone ("Crazy, Stupid, Love" and the upcoming "The Amazing Spider-Man") was party to some pretty funny sketches — ones that will be completely forgotten because of this week's torrid pace of salacious or otherwise terrible stuff cutting into the nightly news.

Actually, they condensed both into one sketch, and it seemed a little rushed. Bill Hader's Perry impersonation stumbled and "um"-ed and "aw"-ed and had a mystery federal department slip his mind, just like he did in Tuesday night's Republican debate. It captures the one-minute-that-seems-like-an-hour kind of torture that the real clip presents, but "SNL" doesn't do much else with it.

Sure, it's not a whiff by any stretch — "Perry" ends up in a cutoff shirt, making up words like "mard" — but that's mostly because it takes a weird "Of Mice and Men" turn. The show's writers were easier on Cain, who had a rough week of his own. Somehow only one joke was lobbed his way. Check it out:

"SNL" even touched on the Penn State scandal — something that most thought would have been off-limits. But Jason Sudeikis and Seth Meyers did an impressively tactful job of finding a way to make this funny. Sudeikis plays an incredibly jovial version of the devil who's just learning about abuse allegations at the school. Even the devil concludes that it's too evil for him.

Of course, a lot of this is really weighty stuff, so "SNL" brought the ridiculous and silly as well — and they paired it up with Coldplay. Kristin Wiig and Fred Armisen's recurring characters Garth and Kat, a perpetually late folk duo who make up songs on the fly, were joined by Coldplay singer Chris Martin to sing some, um, "songs."